The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives

by Theresa Brown

A call makes home, my actual home, too real and thinking too much about home might make me vulnerable in ways the job doesn’t really accommodate.

The time I spent with Sheila, her sister, and brother-in-law feels like one of the most important things I will do today, but it doesn’t show up on any of my electronic to-do lists. We need a menu that includes the option: spent time comforting patient with life-threatening diagnosis. But nothing that empathy-intense gets included in our required paperwork.